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Monday, May 03, 2010

Mary Oliver Event Rescheduled for Wednesday…

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POET MARY OLIVER RESCHEDULED FOR MAY

LAWRENCE – The Hall Center for the Humanities is pleased to announce that Mary Oliver’s visit has been rescheduled. Celebrated poet and winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Mary Oliver will visit KU as part of the Hall Center for the Humanities’ 2009-2010 Humanities Lecture Series. Best known for her poetry’s lyrical connection to the natural world, Oliver will do a reading and take questions from the audience on Wednesday, May 5 at 7:30 p.m. at the Lied Center. This free event, supported by the Sosland Foundation of Kansas City, is open to the public. Kansas Public Radio is a co-sponsor.

The public will have a second opportunity to visit with the poet during “A Conversation with Mary Oliver,” which will take place at the Hall Center Conference Hall on Thursday, May 6 at 10:00 a.m. The author of 18 collections of poetry, most notably the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive (1983) and New and Selected Poems, Volume One (1992), which garnered a National Book Award, Oliver is firmly established among the most accomplished of American poets. She is especially renowned for her evocative and precise imagery, which brings nature into clear focus, transforming the everyday world into a place of magic and discovery. Her most recent collections are The Truro Bear and Other Adventures (2008), new poems and beloved classics about creatures of all sorts, and Evidence (2009). Red Bird (2008) was an immediate national bestseller.Mary Oliver has received the Lannan Foundation Literary Award, the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence, and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, among others. In 1980, her creativity and skill were recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship. Oliver attended Ohio State University and Vassar College, then a women’s college. Over the past two decades she has taught at various colleges and universities – Case Western Reserve, Bucknell, Sweet Briar College, the University of Cincinnati and Bennington College in Vermont.

Founded in 1947, the Humanities Lecture Series is the oldest continuing series at the University of Kansas. More than 150 eminent scholars from around the world have participated in the program, including author Vladimir Nabokov, painter Thomas Hart Benton and author Aldous Huxley. Recent speakers have included Samantha Power, Michael Chabon, and T. R. Reid. Shortly after the program’s inception, a lecture by one outstanding KU faculty member was added to each year’s schedule.